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IE10 Platform Preview 2 out now

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New preview version supports CSS3 Positioned Floats and Web Workers

Some browsers can display this, others can't

Microsoft has pushed out the second platform preview for IE10, 11 weeks after the first one was unveiled. Platform previews enable tech folk to try out features that are close to how they will be in the final product, well before it's released. You can download the preview at ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/.

CSS3 Positioned Floats allow columns of text to flow around objects - you can try out the effect on this Positioned Floats demo.

There's better performance and improved battery usage thanks to technologies such as Web Workers with Channel Messaging, Async script support and others.

Web Workers improve responsiveness by making it possible to run complex JavaScript independently of the code on a page - it can be offloaded to run in the background. There's a test drive that shows you the difference in frame rate when an animation is run with and without Web Workers.

Another good test drive demonstrates the results of the varying HTML5 engines in IE10 PP2, Firefox5 and Chrome 13. The cogs appear quite differently in each browser.

There's also support for HTML5 Sandbox for iframe isolation, which improves security. You can see the official launch post on the IE Blog.